The Aesthetics of Music

Roger Scruton
Print publication date: 1999 Print ISBN-13: 9780198167273 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: Nov-03 DOI: 10.1093/019816727X.001.0001

Sound
Roger Scruton

DOI: 10.1093/019816727X.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

Is an exploration of the metaphysics of sound, arguing that sounds are not properties of the objects that emit them but secondary objects, which can be isolated in an acousmatic experience as pure events, with an internal spatial order.
Keywords: experience, objects, properties, sound, spatial

Sounds and Colours

Like colours, sounds are presented to a single privileged sensemodality. You can hear them, but you cannot see them, touch them, taste them, or smell them. They are objects of hearing in something like the way that colours are objects of sight, and they are missing from the world of deaf people just as colours are missing from the world of the blind. A deaf person could recognize sounds by sensing the vibrations that produce them: this would be a kind of tactile lipreading. But sounds (the sounds of things) would nevertheless be absent from his experience; he could no more gain an acquaintance with sounds by this method than a blind person could become acquainted with colours by reading a Braille spectroscope. A blind person can know many facts about colours, and know which colour any given object is (for example, by asking those with normal eyes to tell him), while not knowing colour. For the knowledge of colour is a species of knowledge by acquaintance, a knowledge of what it is like, which is inseparable from

the experience that delivers it. In the same way a deaf person could know much about sounds, and about the particular sounds emitted by particular objects, while not knowing sound. Primary qualities can be perceived in other ways than by sight, and a blind person is also familiar with them. The shape of a coin can be the object of touch, as much as the object of sight. And it is qualities which are objects of sight, smell, or sound alone that philosophers have traditionally described as secondary. Being red may not be exactly a matter of looking red to the normal observer; nevertheless, how things look to the normal observer in normal conditions is our principal test of colour: for what other access do we have to the colours of things? And now it begins to seem as though colours and other such secondary qualities lie closer to the surface of the world than the primary qualities on which they depend. It is as though they form the phenomenal skin of things, which is peeled away by science. Colours lead a double life: as properties of light, and as features of the things which stand in it. A room may be suffused with a red light; and this means that everything in the room will be redder than otherwise. There is a deep and difficult question as to which application of the idea of colour to the light, or to the things which stand in itis primary.1 In either case, however, colours are properties; and our knowledge of colours stems from our encounter with the things that have themwith coloured things. We are familiar with the colour blue from the look of blue things, and every bit of blue in our world is a blue something. In this sense, colours are dependent on the things which possess them, even if one of those thingslightis a thing of a very peculiar kind.
(p. 2 )

Sounds, however, are not secondary qualities, for the reason that they are not qualities at all. Objects do not have sounds in the way that they have colours: they emit sounds. You could identify a sound while failing to identify its source, and there seems to be nothing absurd in the idea of a sound occurring somewhere without an identifiable cause. If we say that the sound must nevertheless have a cause, this would reflect a metaphysical view about causation (namely, that every eventor every event of a certain kind has a cause), rather than the belief that sounds are qualities. Besides, even if every sound must have a cause, it does not follow that it must also be emitted by its cause, or that it must be understood as the sound of that cause.

The Acousmatic Experience

The separability of sound and cause has important consequences. Pythagoras is reputed to have lectured to his disciples from behind a screen, while they sat in silence attending to his words alone, and without a thought for the man who uttered them. The Pythagoreans were therefore known, Iamblichus tells us, as akousmatikoithose willing to hear. The term has been redeployed by Pierre Schaeffer, to describe the character of sound itself, when considered in the context of the musical experience.2 In listening, Schaeffer argues, we spontaneously detach the sound from the circumstances of its production, (p. 3 ) and attend to it as it is in itself: this, the acousmatic experience of sound, is fortified by recording and broadcasting, which complete the severance of sound from its cause that has already begun in the concert hall. The precise tenor of Schaeffer's argument does not concern us. But his primary intuition is surely of the first importance. The acousmatic experience of sound is precisely what is exploited by the art of music. (It is to the music, and not the instruments, that Ferdinand refers, when he says This music crept by me upon the waters.) Imagine a room (call it the music room), in which sounds are heard; any normal person entering the room is presented with sounds which are audible only there, but which can be traced to no specific source. For instance, you may hear a disembodied voice, or the pure note of a clarinet. Notice that I have described those sounds in terms of their characteristic causes: but I do not have to describe them in that way. The history of music illustrates the attempt to find ways of describing, notating, and therefore identifying sounds, without specifying a cause of them. A specific soundmiddle C at such and such a volume, and with such and such a timbre (these qualities identified acoustically, as part of the way the note sounds)can be heard in the room. Yet there are, let us suppose, no physical vibrations in the room: no instrument is sounding, and nothing else happens there, besides this persistent tone. The case seems to be conceivable, whether or not a real possibility from the point of view of physics; so too is it conceivable that the sounds of an orchestra should exist in this room, and that the person entering it should be granted a musical experience, even though nothing is present or active there, besides the sounds themselves. The one who hears these sounds experiences all that he needs, if he is to understand them as music. He does not have to identify their cause in order to hear them as they should be heard. They provide the complete object of his aural attention.

Physics, Phenomena, and Secondary Objects

Are these sounds physical objects? Well, they exist and are perceived in a certain region of physical space: they are part of the world of extension as the Cartesians would say. But the concept of the physical is not as clear as the old Cartesian idea of extension would make it. Is a rainbow, for example, a physical object? It is visible, certainly, in a region of space, and from a certain point of view in space. But does it really exist in that space, as I do? It seems odd to say so, partly because you cannot encounter the rainbow at the place in which you locate it through sight: approach that place and the rainbow disappears. Or, if it does not, it was not a real, but only an illusory rainbow, so to speak. Moreover, the rainbow does not exactly occupy the place in which we see it, since it excludes nothing from that place. All (p. 4 ) we can say, and perhaps all that we need to say, is that a rainbow is visible to someone of normal sight from a certain point of view: a rainbow is a way that the world appears. It occupies no place, but is only visible in certain places. But it really does exist in the region where it can be seen. On the other hand, rainbows are not secondary qualities: for, like sounds, they are not qualities at all. An Aristotelian would hesitate to classify them as substances: but in a less demanding sense of the term, they are certainly objects, the bearers of properties, things about which there are objective truths, and concerning which we might be mistaken. We too may hesitate to call them physical objects; but they are not mental objects either. A rainbow is not reducible to my experience of it; it is a wellfounded phenomenon in Leibniz's sensean appearance which is also real. To use the scholastic jargon, rainbows are material, and not intentional, objects: an intentional object being defined by the mental state that intends or focuses upon it. Are sounds material objects in that sense? Suppose that I enter the music room, and hear the first bars of Beethoven's Second Symphony, Op. 36 sounding there. I leave the room and return, to discover that the sound has advanced to exactly the point that I would expect, had the symphony been sounding in my absence. Suppose that you too have the same experience, and that in general the constancy and coherence (as Hume described it) of our impressions causes us to speak of the sound as existing there, in the room, and not in the heads of those who stand in it. Might we not be justified in speaking in this way? The case is reminiscent of the argument of chapter 2 of Individuals, in which Strawson imagines a pure sound world, a world which contains nothing but

sounds, and in which, nevertheless, under certain conditions (Strawson suggests) the hearer may find a use for the distinction between being and seeming, between the real world of sounds, and the merely apparent one. I do not say that Strawson's argument is right; but it is surely plausible to assume that, in our world, with its independently established spatial framework, sounds may be as real for us as smells or rainbows are. If you ask whether they are also really real, then the answer will parallel the one that might be supplied for smells or rainbows. From the point of view of physics, the reality consists in this: that changes occur in the primary properties of things, which cause systematic effects in the perceptual experiences of normal people. (Light waves are refracted in raindrops and make their divided progress to the eye; vapours are emitted by objects and linger in the nose; vibrations are produced in the air, and communicate themselves to our sense of hearing.) But there can be objective and decidable judgements about something, even if it is not, from the point of view of physics, part of the ultimate reality. Secondary qualities are an instance of this; so too are secondary objects, as I shall call them, like rainbows, (p. 5 ) smells, and sounds. Moreover, aesthetic interest (which is our real subject in this discussion) is an interest in appearances: its object is not the underlying structure of things, but the revealed presence of the world the world as it is encountered in our experience (the Lebenswelt, to use Husserl's term for it). (I ask the reader to take this claim on trust, since only later can I offer a proof of it.) An aesthetic interest in sound need attribute to sounds no more than the qualified reality that they have in my example: the reality of a wellfounded phenomenon, of a material (as opposed to intentional) object that is not strictly part of the underlying physical order. A difficulty arises at this point which parallels certain difficulties that arise in the discussion of secondary qualities. If someone asks what is it, to be red, the temptation is to follow Locke, and describe the quality as a power or disposition. To be red is to be disposed to produce in the normal observer the experience of seeing red. (The definition is of course circular: but we need not decide, for present purposes, whether the circle is vicious.) But, it might be said, you cannot stop there; dispositions must be grounded: there must be some structural feature of the object, by virtue of which it is disposed to present this appearance. And if that is so, should we not say that redness consists in possessing this structural feature, that this is what it is to be red? It would take us too far afield to explore all the avenues that are opened by this suggestion. But it is worth bearing the following countervailing arguments in mind: first, the assumption that dispositions must be

grounded in structural features has never been persuasively defended. Indeed, it is very hard to reconcile with quantum mechanics, which shows precisely that our desire to replace dispositional by occurrent properties cannot, in the end, be satisfied. (Such, at any rate, is the conclusion that a philosopher is likely to draw from Bell's theorem, which shows the untenability of Einstein's argument for the view that God does not play dice).3 Secondly, why should we assume, in the case of redness, that there is only one structural feature responsible for this appearance? Could there not be two or three, maybe indefinitely many? Only on the assumption that red things form a natural kind, in the sense made familiar by John Stuart Mill, and more recently by Putnam and Kripke, could we rule out such possibilities.4 But if red means looks as this looks (pointing to an instance), it is plainly not a naturalkind term. It could become so only by ceasing to be the name of a secondary quality. Thirdly, the advance of physics has certainly made us familiar with a relevant natural kind: namely red light. It is now known that red things do, in fact, have something in common, namely that they emit or refract light in a certain range of wavelengths. But this is precisely not a structural feature of the objects themselves. And the redness of red light is again something that it possesses only by virtue of its appearance. Red light, defined as light of a certain range of wavelengths, might cease to appear red, and yet still be essentially what it is. Hence this natural kind does not provide us with a real essence of redness, even if red light has a real essence, and even if that real essence is uniquely responsible for our seeing red.
(p. 6 )

The example is important, since it relates directly to the true physics of sound. As we know, sounds are also produced by waves: vibrations which are communicated to the ear. If I see a rainbow, I know that light waves are reaching my eyes from the direction in which they are turned: and that is the physical reality which explains what I see. Likewise, if I hear a tone, I know that sound waves are reaching my ears from the direction in which I locate the tone; and that is the physical reality which explains what I hear. If the example of the music room is to be physically possible, then it must be that such sound vibrations are occurring in the room: it cannot contain sounds without also containing sound waves. (Cannot, here, denotes physical rather than metaphysical impossibility.) But we should no more identify the sound with the sound wave than we identify the redness of an object with the light that comes from it. There

is no better case for eliminating the phenomenal reality of sound in favour of the primary qualities of sound waves than there is for eliminating the phenomenal reality of colours and rainbows. By using the term phenomenal reality I wish again to emphasize the distinction between an appearance and a mere appearance. Even in the realm of appearance we can distinguish what is objectively so, from what is merely apparently so to a particular observer. Red things are really red, even though redness is a matter of appearance. Some things are merely apparently red, because of a trick of the light or a defect in the observer. Hence there is a distinction between being red and merely looking red, even though redness is a matter of how things look.

Sounds as Secondary Objects

Likewise with sounds; the presence of a sound is established by how things sound to the normal observer, and by nothing else. But we can still distinguish between sounds which are really there to be heard, and sounds which are merely imaginary. And the case is additionally interesting on account of the fact that sounds are not properties of anything. We do not predicate (p. 7 ) them of other things, but regard them as the bearers of auditory properties (pitch, timbre, and so on). Gareth Evans doubts this, arguing (in the course of discussing Strawson's sound world) as follows: We can think of sounds as perceptible phenomena, phenomena that are independent of us, and that can exist unperceived, because we have the resources for thinking of the abiding stuff in whose changes the truth of the proposition that there is a sound can be regarded as consisting.5 And he goes on to locate the stuff to which he refers as the source, whatever it might be, of the sound vibrations. But the argument is not persuasive. The phenomenal sound is indeed always the result of sound waves. But this does not show that the distinction between the sound that is there, and the sound that merely appears to be there, cannot be drawn at the phenomenal level, in just the way that we distinguish the real from the apparent colour of a thing. To be precise: to say that middle C really is sounding in the music room is to imply that any normal observer who entered there in normal conditions would hear middle C. This counterfactual condition is the ultimate fact of the matterthe fact in which the distinction between real and apparent sound is groundedjust as in the case of colours. However, sounds are not qualities of things, but independently existing

objects. The conclusion must be that there is no abiding stuff of which they are predicated. Their objective reality is phenomenal, but also intrinsic. But what kind of objects are they? Notice, first, that we do not have clear identityconditions for sounds. We can count them and individuate them in many ways, depending on our interests. Suppose, for example, that a middle C with the timbre of a clarinet is sounding in the music room. Suddenly the timbre changes to that of an oboe. Do we say that one sound was replaced by another, or merely that it changed its character? Neither description is forced on us, and everything will depend upon our interests. (If the change occurs in a context where orchestration matters, we are likely to say that there were two sounds; otherwise, it may be more natural to speak of one.) Some might say that such arbitrariness is merely proof that the concept of numerical identity does not here apply, and that sounds are therefore objects only in a derivative sense: metaphysically speaking they are not objects at all, but properties of the regions in which they are heard. And again, from the metaphysical point of view, this robust Aristotelianism has much to be said for it. However, it fails to do justice to the phenomenal character of sounds, whose role in our perception and response cannot be adequately understood without the concept of numerical identity. Consider words, for example. These are identified in two waysas types and as (p. 8 ) tokens, to use C. S. Peirce's famous (though obscure) distinction.6 The word man is both present in this sentence, as a token, and exemplified as a type. And if the sentence is spoken aloud, we have an instance of the token utterance of man: the individual sound, recognition of which as the same again is necessary if we are to understand the spoken type. Is not this token utterance an individual? It has properties which it shares with other sound individuals: it is loud, longdrawnout, and finishes abruptly. But it is distinct from its properties, just as the token Ford Cortina car is distinct from the properties which inhere in it, at least some of which define the type of which it is an instance. It is partly because we have such an interest in wordtypes, whose properties and relations constitute our language, that we treat the token utterance as an individual, whose properties are to be divided into those which belong to the type, and those which are merely accidents of the token. And this interest in sound types is exemplified also in music: although in this case the types are defined in another way. However, the case is clearly not like that of the Ford Cortina, whose tokens are individual physical objects, unproblematic bearers of a numerical

identity that they would retain whether or not there were a type which partly conditioned it. I do not say that the numerical identity of my car can be fixed without reference to my interests: for plainly, the Ford Cortina is an artificial and not a natural kind, and criteria of tokenidentity do not in such a case lie in the nature of things. Nevertheless, the concept of numerical identity seems far less problematic than in the case of sounds, partly because my car is an object in space, with definite boundaries, standing in clear physical relations to other such objects. A sound, on the other hand, lasts for a certain time and then vanishes without remainder. Its spatial properties are indeterminate or vague, and even its temporal boundaries may be unclear until fixed by convention. Thus Husserl, in his attempt to define the individual tone, as opposed to the character possessed by it, was inclined to identify a tone through the specific now point at which it is heard. Only when circumscribed by the now does the tone become an individual, whose identity is fixed to it for ever, and accompanies it on its endless journey into the past.7 But this suggestion would remove the problem of the identity of sound events only if the boundaries of the now were fixed by natureand this is clearly not so. Now may designate this instant, this (p. 9 ) minute, this day, week, or era, depending upon the speaker's interests. And even if we think, with William James, that there is a phenomenal minimum in the experience of timea specious present which cannot be further divided we can think of such a thing, only because we do divide it intellectually, regarding every now as infinitely divisible: and likewise for the events and processes that ride upon the present as it buoys them backwards to oblivion.8

Events and Processes

Whatever they are, sounds are either events or processes. But what exactly are events and processes, and what, if anything, is the distinction between them? Both events and processes occur; but in normal parlance only processes endure. Events happen at a time, processes last through a time. An event marks a change in the world; a process may last unchangingly. Thus the beginning or ending of a process is an event. Although we can, in this way, make a distinction between events and processes, the distinction is by no means hard and fast. It may be difficult to decide whether something is an event or a process: consider explosions, storms, emotions. Maybe events and processes belong to a single metaphysical categorythe category of happenings or things which occur. Actions, for example, seem to include both events and processes; and one

and the same actioneating an applemay be described in either way. In thinking about these matters it is probably wrong to be too closely guided by ordinary language. It may be better to adopt some general term to cover things which occur, and to leave the distinctions for the places where they are needed. Since the term currently favoured by philosophers is event, I shall adopt itwhile asking the reader to remember that while all sounds, according to this usage, are events, some are also processes. Events do not figure in Kant's Table of Categories, although Aristotle acknowledges them under the heading of action and passion (to poiein kai paschein).9 The sparseness of Aristotle's remarks is to some extent compensated for in his extended treatment of coming to be and passing away (De Generatione et Corruptione); but it is power and causation that concern him, and he offers us nothing, so far as I can tell, about the metaphysical status of events. Kant is equally interested in causation, which features in two of his twelve categories; but nothing that he says casts any light whatsoever on the nature of events or their place in our ordinary scheme of things. Nevertheless, events are fundamental items in our ontology, and no view of the world that excluded them would be complete. They are also intrinsically problematic. There is, for example, a problem about the individuation and identity of events which remains unsolved in the existing literature. Consider a car crash. How many events is this? The answer seems to be indeterminate. For the policeman it is one event; for the surgeon it is as many events as victims; for the spectator it is an inexhaustible multitude of horrors. But this indeterminacy in no way shows that there are no such things as individual events: it merely reminds us of our ontological priorities. Our world is a world of substancesthings, organisms, and people; events and processes are what happen to those substances. There are philosophers who reverse this priority: the process philosophers, such as Whitehead and Hartshorne, who regard substances as participants in processes, and process itself as the fundamental reality. But their philosophy notoriously comes to grief over the idea of the individual, and finds no anchor for language in the endless flow of happening.
(p. 10 )

More recent philosophers have tried to come to grips with the problem of events. Jaegwon Kim has proposed that we construe events as exemplifications of properties at timesthus making the identity of events parasitic upon the identity of properties.10 (But do we really have a clear idea of that kind of identity?) Donald Davidson, whose ontology of events

is dictated by the desire to understand the logic of action and causality,11 gives priority to the question of eventidentity. But his suggestionthat an event is individuated by the totality of its causal relationsprovides us with no criterion that we could apply in sorting one event from another. Moreover, there seem to be no grounds for accepting it, apart from the desireby no means universalto save the rest of Davidson's system. (Consider two uncaused events with no effects: for Davidson these must be one event even if they occur in completely different regions and at completely different times: surely a reductio ad absurdum.)12 Granted the ontological priority of substances (the persons and material objects of Strawson's Individuals), we can in fact live happily with a fluid concept of the identity of events and processes. There is no problem presented by the fact that the car crash is as many events as our interests determine, since we do not have to identify the events in order to refer to the episode and communicate about it. We identify the individuals, and say what happened to them. Moreover, there are good reasons for retaining a fluid concept of eventidentity. Our worldview rests on three applications of the concept of identity: to abstract particulars, like numbers, to concrete individuals, like tables, animals, and people, and to natural kinds like the lion, the oak tree, or chlorine. Abstract particulars lie outside time, and, being immune to change, possess all their properties essentially. Concrete individuals are situated in the stream of time, subject to its unending erosion, and can be understood, therefore, only through a concept of identityacrosstime. As Strawson has cogently argued, it is their reidentifiability which endows these elementary substances with their being, and makes them the anchor to our thoughts.13 But criteria for identity across time acquire their authority from the identity of kinds, and it is only because we sort the world into kinds that we can reidentify its individual occupants. It seems then the concept of identity owes its importance to our unending, hopeless, but necessary struggle against the flow of time.
(p. 11 )

Events, however, do not stand against the current; on the contrary, the current is composed of them. To endow events with rigid conditions of identity would be precisely to lift them from the stream of time, like numbers, or else to anchor them in the midst of it, like rocks and stones and trees. In either case, it would be to denature them: to destroy their character as events. To deploy a strict criterion of eventidentity, we might say, is to sacrifice becoming to being, and so to lose our sense of time's dominion.

The Pure Event

That brief excursus is highly speculative, and this is not the place to continue it. But it leads us to an interesting point. In the case of a car crash, the event is identified through its participants. It consists in changes undergone by them. And this is something that we observe. In general, when we see an event or a process, we see the objects which participate in it. I cannot witness a car crash without witnessing a car crashing. And this applies to visible events generally: in seeing an event, I see objects which change; in seeing a process I see objects which act in a certain way. In the case of sounds, however, we are presented with pure events. Although the sound that I hear is produced by something, I am presented in hearing with the sound alone. The thing that produces the sound, even if it is something heard, is not the intentional object of hearing, but only the cause of what I hear. Of course, in ordinary daytoday matters, we leap rapidly in thought from the sound to its cause, and speak quite accurately of hearing the car, just as we speak of seeing it. But the phenomenal (p. 12 ) distinctness of sounds makes it possible to imagine a situation in which a sound is separated entirely from its cause, and heard acousmatically, as a pure process. This is indeed what happens in the music room. In hearing, therefore, we are presented with something that vision cannot offer us: the pure event, in which no individual substances participate, and which therefore becomes the individual object of our thought and attention. Although the assignment of numerical identity to such a thing remains arbitrary, or at least interestrelative, it comes to have a peculiar importance. We begin to treat sounds as the basic components of a sound world: a world which contains nothing else but sound. And we therefore begin to take an interest in the repeatable events which fill that world, availing ourselves of criteria of sameness and difference which enable us to reproduce the sound that strikes us, with all its salient features still intact. Sound events take time. But being pure events, their temporal order is the basic order that they exhibit. It is through temporal divisions that we discompose them into parts, and the primary relations between events are temporal: before, after, and simultaneous define the positions of sounds in the acousmatic world. It is true that we locate sounds in space: as over there, nearby, far away, and so on. But as we come to focus on the sounds themselves, this feature is gradually refined away, and plays only an attenuated part in music. The offstage trumpets in Mahler's first and second Symphonies are meant to evoke a sense of distance: but it is a distance

of the imagination; these trumpets call to us from far away, and also from within, like the voices of the dead; their distance is metaphorical, and they are as present in the musical structure as the other sounds with which they coincide. Similarly, the dialogue between cor anglais and oboe, in the third movement of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, in which the oboe is placed offstage so as to create the effect of shepherds answering each other across a valley, is not a dialogue in physical space, even if it uses our perception of physical space, in order to remind us of the sense of distance. Musically speaking, there is no distance at all between the oboe and the cor anglais, both of which float in the same musical empyrean. The point here may not be intuitively obvious. For one thing, the physical space between sounds plays an important part in the musical experience as in the last example, or in the arrangement of orchestras, choirs, and chamber groups. Stereo reproduction make an important contribution to the musical experience, precisely because it reproduces the spatial array of sound. But the case should be compared with that of a picture, in which the spatial relations between brushstrokes on the canvas are indispensable to the experience, even though the space that we see in the picture has nothing to do with that in which the brushstrokes lie. We must notice the distance between this patch of red and that of yellow, so as to see the relation (p. 13 ) between the figures that they represent. The patches are inches apart in the space that we occupy. The figures are separated by half a mile, in an imagined space of their own. Likewise, the spatial array of the orchestra induces us into the musical space; but it is not part of it, and gives way to it, just as soon as we are gripped by the musical perception.

The Sound Space

The world of pure sound exhibits other interesting features. Sounds do not cut each other off from the ear, as visible objects cut each other off from the eye. A sound may drown out its competitors, but this is because it saturates our hearing, so that we can no longer discriminate what is there. (The case should be compared with pain: a severe pain distracts me from lesser pains; but it does not hide them from view.) A visible object, by contrast, may stand between me and another such object, thus veiling it. The physics of sight and sound explains this difference. An opaque object does not allow light to pass; but no sound wave can impede the passage of other sound waves, and therefore no sound can be opaque. (When we describe sounds in that way, we use a metaphor. For example, the chords which mark the opening rhythm in the second movement of the Rite of Spring are opaque.

But there is no way of explaining what this means, without using another metaphor. Light does not pass through these chords; they block out the background; all other musical events are heard as in front of them: and so on.) This absence of opacity in the sound world means that, if no sound is too loud, I may be able to hear all the contents of that world (all that are audible here, that is) simultaneously. The world of sound may lie open before me, with none of its contents outside my awareness. The paradigm case of this is music, in which the sound world can be surveyed in its entirety, with its regions clearly defined: in music we obtain a God'sear view of things. Thus a great contrapuntalist like Bach, or a great orchestrator like Ravel, presents us with an open soundscape, in which every musical element is directly audible. However, we are not part of the world of sound, as we are part of the visual world. I see things before me, spatially related to me. But I do not stand in the world of sound as I stand in the world of sight. Nor is this surprising, given that the world of sound contains events and processes only, and no persons or other substances. (This point seems to me to show the flaw in the thoughtexperiment of Strawson's Individuals, chapter 2: the observer can neither exist in that world of sounds, nor out of it.) The sound world is inherently other, and other in an interesting way: it is not just that we do not belong in it; it is that we could not belong in it: it is metaphysically apart from us. And yet we have a complete view of it, and (p. 14 ) discover in it, through music, the very life that is ours. There lies the mystery, or part of it. Nevertheless, there is a temptation to say that the sound world has a spatial, or quasispatial order: a temptation yielded to by Strawson in his interesting attempt to construct the absent argument of Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic the argument for the striking claim that space is the form of outer sense: i.e. for the claim that we cannot perceive something as existing objectively without situating it in a spatial frame. It is as though pitch formed a one dimensional space, through which sounds can move much as physical objects move through physical space. But as soon as we take seriously the fact that sounds are not substances but events, whose identityconditions are inherently contested, we see that we cannot speak of them in that way. There need be no clear sense attached to the idea of the same sound, now at this place, now at that; or to the idea of a place containing now this sound, now that. Of course, we can invent a use for these notions: but it will not confer on the pitch spectrum the property that it does not,

and cannot have, of being a dimension, analogous to the dimensions of physical space. The essential feature of a spatial dimension is that it contains places, which can be occupied by things, and between which things can move. Sounds may be arranged on the pitch spectrum, but no sound can move from one place on that spectrum to another without changing in a fundamental respect. It would be as reasonable to say that it had changed into another sound (a semitone higher, for instance), as that it had moved through auditory space. Moreover, there is no clear orientation of sounds in auditory space: no way of assigning faces, ends, boundaries, and so on to them, so as to introduce those topological features which help us to make sense of the idea of occupying a place. Far from confirming Kant's thesis, the acousmatic experience offers a world of objects which are ordered in space only apparently, and not in fact. Of course, we speak of up and down in relation to the pitch spectrum, and higher and lower too. And these are very important descriptions, integral to the experience of music. But literally speaking these descriptions are false. High and low on the pitch spectrum are like high and low on the temperature scale, or the scale of the real numbers: they indicate the existence of a continuum, but not that of a dimension. There is no sense in which the temperature of a body occupies a place on the Celsius scale: as though it could have occupied another place and still have been the temperature that it is! (We should note, too, that not every language is like English, in using high and low or their equivalents for the two ends of the pitch spectrum. French has aigu and grave, for example, while the Greeks used high where we speak of low and vice versa, since they were guided by the places of the strings on the lyre. On the other hand, all people (p. 15 ) recognize movement in music from low to high (in our sense) as an upward movement, and the opposite as downward, and it is this feature of the musical experience that stands in need of an explanation.) Spatial metaphors permeate our experience of music, and the organization which produces music out of sound prompts us, almost inexorably, to think of sound in spatial terms. Why this is so, and the consequences of its being so, will occupy us in Chapter 2.

The Pitch Matrix

One final observation should be made concerning the world of sounds. Sounds are arranged on the pitch spectrum, which is a continuum: between any two pitches there lies a third. This is not merely a physical trutha truth

about pitch, construed as Helmholtz would construe it, as the frequency of a vibration.14 It is also a phenomenal truth: while we may not be able to discriminate one pitch from its near neighbour, between any two pitches that we can discriminate, there will be a third, possibly indiscriminable. (Compare shades of red: there can be a phenomenal continuum, even when our capacities of discriminate are, as they must be, finite. In this way we acquire the idea of a phenomenal distinction, even though it is a distinction with no phenomenal reality for us.)15 Nevertheless, it is an interesting fact that we do not treat the phenomenal continuum as a mere continuum. Like the colour spectrum, it has salient points and thresholds. Orange shades into red: but orange and red are different colours. Orange is not a shade of red, nor red a shade of orange. Likewise, one pitch shades into the pitch a semitone above: but, having got there, we recognize the new pitch as another pitch. In between the two we are likely to think of an outoftune version of either. There is a kind of grid lying over the pitch continuum, dividedfor usinto the semitones of the chromatic scale, which leads us to hear all pitches within the octave as versions of those twelve fundamental pitches: versions more or less out of tune. This grid is not a static thing: it has changed since the introduction of equal temperament, and even now it shifts noticeably, for a stringplayer, from key to key. It is in part the centuries of musicmaking that have created this grid, and other civilizations have used other divisions of the scalewhether into (p. 16 ) twentyfour equal tones, as in classical Arabian music, or into the highly uneven divisions of the Greek modes,16 or into the inflected and sliding tones of the Indian scales; but it is there in each of us, and has its basis in the experience of harmony. Cultural variations do not alter the fact that all musical people, from whatever tradition, will divide the octave into discrete pitches or pitch areas, and hear intervening pitches as out of tune.

Sound and Tone

Those reflections on the nature of sound and the experience of sound already suggest some of the reasons for the special place accorded in our lives to music. Music is an art of sound, and much that seems strange in music can be traced to the strangeness of the sound world itself. Nevertheless, music is itself a special kind of sound, and not any art of sound is music. For instance, there is an art, and an aesthetic intention, in designing a fountain, and the sound of the fountain is allimportant in the aesthetic effect. But the art of fountains is not music. For one thing, the sound of the fountain must be heard in physical space, and should be part of the charm of a place. Nor is it the work of a musician to write poetry, even

though poetry too is an art of sound. So what distinguishes the sound of music? The simple answer is organization. But it is no answer at all if we cannot say what kind of organization we have in mind. Poetry too is organized sound: sound organized thrice over, first by the rules of syntax and semantics, secondly by the aesthetic intention of the poet, and thirdly by the reader or listener, as he recuperates the images and thoughts and holds them in suspension. And although we have paradigms of musical organization, in the canon of masterpieces, it is not obvious that these are all organized in the same way, or that they exhaust the possibilities. Some may argue that the electronic noises produced on a computer by such radical composers as Dennis Lorrain are music; others may make similar claims for such purely percussive sequences as Varse's Ionisation, or collections of evocative sounds in the style of George Crumb, as in his Music for a Summer Evening. Modernism has been so prolific of deviant cases that we hesitate to call them deviant, for fear of laying down a law which we cannot justify: even John Cage's notorious four minutes and thirtythree seconds of silence has featured in the annals of musicology. So how do we begin to define our theme? Such questions have bedevilled aesthetics in our timesand unnecessarily so. For they are empty questions, which present no real challenge to the philosopher who has a full conception of his subject. Whatever it is, music (p. 17 ) is not a natural kind. What is to count as music depends upon our decision; and it is a decision made with a purpose in mind. That purpose is to describe, and if possible to extend, the kind of interest that we have in a Beethoven symphony. Other things satisfy that interest; and there is no way of saying in advance which things these will benot until we have a clear idea of what exactly interests us in the Beethoven. The question whether this or that modernist or postmodernist experiment is a work of music is empty, until we have furnished ourselves with an account of our central instances of the art. Only then do we know what the question means. And even then we may feel no great need to answer it. The best way of summarizing those central instances is to say that they each achieve, though not necessarily in the same way, a transformation of sounds into tones. A tone is a sound which exists within a musical field of force. This field of force is something that we hear, when hearing tones. It may not be possible for all creatures to hear it; indeed, if subsequent arguments are right, it is only rational beings, blessed with imagination, who can hear

sounds as tones. It may even be that the transformation from sound to tone is effected within the act of hearing, and has no independent reality. But it is a transformation that can be described, just as soon as we forget the attempt to find something in common to all the works that critics have described as music. This transformation from sound to tone may, nevertheless, be usefully likened to the transformation of a sound into a word. The word bang consists, in its token utterances, of a sound. This sound could occur in nature, and yet not have the character of a word. What makes it the word that it is, is the grammar of a language, which mobilizes the sound and transforms it into a word with a specified role: it designates a sound or an action in English, an emotional state in German. When hearing this sound as a word I hear the field of force supplied by grammar. The sound comes to me alive with implications, with possibilities of speech. I do not merely hear the sound of the voice: I hear language, which is an experience of meaning. When I hear what you say, I may be unaware of the sounds that you are making, unaware that you are speaking French, with an accent du Midi. Language causes us to hear the voice as in a certain sense outside nature: it is not a sound, but a message broadcast into the soundscape. (Cf. Aristotle's argument that the voice is distinct from all other objects of hearing, since we hear it in another way.)17 Something similar happens when I hear middle C while walking, and take it for a note in music. Maybe it was only a bird, a child playing with a squeaky toy, a rusty hinge turning. It would then be the same sound; but to hear it as those sounds (p. 18 ) would be to situate it outside the order which is music. To hear a sound as music is not merely to hear it, but also to order it. The order of music is a perceived order. When we hear tones, we hear their musical implications in something like the way that we hear the grammatical implications of words in a language. Of course, we probably do not know the theory of musical organization, cannot say in words what is going on when the notes of a Haydn quartet sound so right and logical. But nor do we know the theory of English grammar, or the principles of syntactical construction, even though we can identify a sentence as an intelligible piece of English. Maybe you could say that we have tacit knowledge of grammar, as Chomsky does. But in that sense we have tacit knowledge too of music. This knowledge is expressed not in theories but in acts of recognition. It is possible, as I shall argue, to make too much of the analogy with language. But it is a useful analogy, and launches us on our path. It also

reminds us of an allimportant fact about sounds, which is that they have a primary occurrence in the lives of rational beings, as instruments of communication. It is in the form of sound that language is normally first learned; and it is through sound that we communicate most immediately and effectively when face to face. It is impossible to put this fact behind us. Every sound intentionally made is instinctively taken to be an attempt at communication. And this is as true of music as it is of speech. In the presence of sound intentionally produced, and intentionally organized, we feel ourselves within another person's ambit. And that feeling conditions our response to what we hear. We are now in a position to explore some of the distinguishing marks of tones, and of the organization that creates them.

Notes:
(1) See L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, tr. L. J. McAlister and M. Schattle (Oxford, 1977), and J. Westphal's illuminating discussion in Colour: A Philosophical Introduction (2nd edn., London, 1991). There are those who doubt that colours are properties, believing that we need finer metaphysical distinctions in order to map this territory. (See, e.g., J. Levinson, Properties and Related Entities, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 39 (1978), 122.) I retain the terms property and quality, and use them loosely to denote that which corresponds, at the ontological level, to an adjective. This loose usage may be questioned; but it enables me to make the distinctions that I need, and I shall therefore ignore some of the metaphysical niceties. (2) Trait des objets musicaux (Paris, 1966). (3) See J. S. Bell, Bertleman's Socks and the Nature of Reality, J. Phys. (Paris), 42 (1981), 4161. (4) J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (London, 1943), Bk I, ch. 7 sect. 4; H. Putman, Is Semantics Possible?, in his Collected Papers, ii. Meaning and Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1975); S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980). (5) Things without the Mind, in Collected Papers (Oxford, 1993), 278. (6) See e.g. the explanation given by Peirce to Lady Welby, in Charles S. Peirce, Selected Writings, ed. P. P. Wiener (New York, 1958), 406. Peirce's distinction has been interestingly applied in the musical context by R.

S. Hatton, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation (Indianapolis, 1994), 4456. (7) E. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, ed. M. Heidegger, tr. J. S. Churchill (The Hague, 1964), 6970. (8) Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York, 1890), i. 608 ff. James takes the expression specious present from E. R. Clay (ibid. 609). (9) Categories, 11b. (10) Events as Property Exemplifications, in M. Brand and D. Walton (eds.), Action Theory (Dordrecht, 1980), 15977. Kim's view has been effectively criticized by J. Bennett in Events and their Names (Oxford, 1988), 7587. (11) The Individuation of Events, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980). (12) The argument here is spelled out at length by M. Brand, Identity Conditions for Events, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1977), 32977. (13) Individuals (London, 1959), ch.1. (14) H. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, tr. A. J. Ellis (London, 1885; repr. New York, 1954). (15) Diana Raffman doubts this, and argues that the pitch spectrum is not dense, in Goodman's sense, but disjoint, since our powers of aural discrimination are finite. See Language, Music and Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 121. But she goes on to recognize that the pitch continuum is experienced as if it were dense. In fact, this as if is what constitutes density, in the phenomenal realm. (16) See the discussion in M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), ch. 6. (17) See De Anima, 420b.